The Years the Word Was Eaten

Ionie has more beans than any two households could eat and she is standing in the middle of the patch at eight in the morning in a cardigan over her nightdress, which she would deny if anybody asked.

It has been a year. The tomatoes have gone mad. The beans are past the top of the canes and have started coming back down the other side. There is a basket on the path she filled twenty minutes ago and she is going to have to start giving things over the fence again, which she loves and pretends to find inconvenient.

Two summers ago she lost the whole lot.

Blight. It came in wet in July and it took everything in eleven days, and she pulled it all out and burned it and stood in an empty patch in August feeling something out of all proportion to a garden.

Because the garden was not the only thing.

Ionie is fifty-four. Between about twenty-nine and forty-nine she was inside a version of following God that ran on one word, and the word was holy, and it governed absolutely everything. What she wore, who she saw, what she said, what she allowed herself to want, which of her own thoughts were permitted to finish. There was nothing dramatic in it. Nobody was cruel to her. She was not in a compound. It was a set of expectations, held sincerely by people who loved her, that she took on completely and enforced on herself more strictly than any of them ever enforced it.

And it ate twenty years.

Not in the sense that nothing happened. Plenty happened. But her marriage got thin in that stretch and never entirely thickened again. Three friendships she should have kept, she let go, quietly, for reasons that made sense at the time and make no sense to her now. She did not train for the thing she was clearly built for. She has a decade in there she genuinely cannot account for.

She got out at forty-nine, and she has been fine since, and the fine has a hole in it.

Now she is standing in a patch that has come back so hard it is embarrassing, on exactly the same ground the blight took, and she is not thinking about beans.

You have a stretch like that. Yours might be shorter. It might not have been that word. But you know what got eaten, and you know you have never once expected anybody to give it back.

God offers back the one thing nobody can give back

Joel is a short book about a real disaster. Four kinds of locust come through in successive waves and strip a country to the ground, and the first chapter is one of the bleakest descriptions of loss in the Bible.

And then, in the second chapter, this.

And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.Joel 2:25

The years. Not the crop. Not the equivalent value of the crop. The years.

Nobody can give you back time. That is the one currency that has never been refundable in the history of the world, and God, in a short book about insects, says the word years.

You have been offered back the one thing nobody else has ever been able to return. That is the written word and not my sympathy over a fence, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a promise made to a wrecked farming country and lays it in a garden at eight in the morning.

And notice something honest in that verse that most people skip. He calls the locusts my great army which I sent among you. Joel does not pretend the disaster came from nowhere. There is a reckoning in that book and God does not tidy it away.

Which makes the offer larger, not smaller. He is not restoring years that were taken by accident while He was looking elsewhere. He is speaking into a genuine ruin, with full knowledge of how it came about, and saying I will restore.

He does it on the same ground

Now the shape of the restoring, because this is where the word gets handed back to you rather than just admired.

He does not rewind. There is no verse anywhere that offers you 1999 again. What Joel describes in the verses either side is a land producing: the floors full of wheat, the fig tree and the vine yielding their strength, and in verse twenty-six, ye shall eat in plenty, and be satisfied, and praise the name of the LORD your God, that hath dealt wondrously with you: and my people shall never be ashamed.

Same fields. Same soil. Same country that was stripped bare. The restoration comes up out of the ground that was eaten.

This is yours, and the restoring happens on the ground you already have, and it is already under way. Joel 2 says the years in that exact word, and the same Spirit who is poured out three verses later is the one making it a present fact in a woman standing in a patch in her cardigan.

Let me guard this properly, because it would be easy to preach it badly and I have heard it preached badly.

I am not promising you that a particular thing comes back. This site does not do that, and I will not stand in your garden and tell you the specific outcome, because that is a promise I was never authorized to make. Some of what was eaten was eaten. There are friendships that do not come back and years that stay gone and a version of your life that did not happen.

And I am not telling you to go back and prosecute anybody. The people in that stretch of your life loved you, most of them, and were carrying the same thing, and Joel gets to say my great army because He is God and we are not.

What I am telling you is what the verse says, which is that the God who watched twenty years get stripped uses the word restore about time, on purpose, in writing, and that whatever He means by it, He means something, and He means it about the years and not merely about the feelings.

And the specific thing being handed back to you this morning is the word itself. That is what is standing in the patch. The word that ate twenty years is the same word that is going to feed you for the next thirty, and it will come up out of exactly the ground it was taken from, because that is how He does it.